The new National Education Policy, brought into force in the year 2020 (NEP2020) by the right-wing political party in power, makes repeated reference to the superiority of ancient Indian mathematical knowledge and calls for incorporating it into the school mathematics curriculum. Alongside this, it foregrounds the need to build competence in technocentric areas in mathematics for India to emerge as a global knowledge superpower. However, the document is silent on ethnomathematics and the need to research it, even though in India there is a lot of mathematical knowledge embedded in the work of different caste groups. This chapter discusses the dangers of casteism and religious fundamentalism inherent in the national education policy and the way mathematics education envisions the global citizen and its other in India.

Mathematics has, not only a long history in India like in any other ancient civilization, but it also carries a very high value in the present-day India, basically because of its importance in engineering education. India has made some important contributions to mathematics in the last 150 years. Yet, such a description hides the fact that ‘India’ here refers to a tiny minority of Hindu dominant caste middle-class men (and a couple of women from the same sociocultural and economic background). Though precolonial India had indigenous traditions of education, the caste and gender to which one belonged determined what kind of education one could get. It is only during the colonial rule that access to education was made independent of one’s caste and it is only as late as 2009 that India made the right to education a fundamental right, making free and compulsory education available for all up to the age of fourteen. The representation of those from marginalized castes in institutions of higher education and the public sector has been meagre and to address this the government of India introduced a form of affirmative action that reserved a certain percentage of seats in institutions of higher education and employment for those from marginalized castes and tribes. In the 1990s the union government introduced the Mandal recommendations extending reservation to the backwards castes. Though this led to massive protests by the dominant castes arguing that selection criteria should be one’s merit and not the caste to which one belonged, the post-Mandal period saw the emergence of new knowledge that critically engaged with the notion of merit and the caste question in academia. The National Curriculum Framework in 2005 internalised some of the new understandings and addressed the caste question in school education seeking to empower learners from marginalized caste backgrounds. However, over the decades, there has been a rise in Hindu fundamentalism actively fanned and supported by the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak (RSS) and in three consecutive elections held in 2014, 2019 and 2024, Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), a Hindu right-wing political party came to power at the centre allowing it the opportunity to introduce a new education policy in the year 2020 and make significant changes to school education and higher education. This policy and its implementation chave come for strong criticism from educationists. This paper seeks to engage with the question of marginalization, discuss how caste and gender privilege some and exclude some in mathematics, the small gains made following the Mandal recommendation in the 1990s and argue that Hindu fundamentalism seeks to restore the manuvadam65F1- the caste order which puts people in a social hierarchy based on caste right at the time of birth. The paper seeks to bring to light the systematic ways in which the RSS-BJP combine deploys manuvadam and increasing privatisation together to ‘saffronize’ school mathematics curriculum on the one hand and nullify the effects of Mandal recommendations by increasing privatization of higher education and employment in the country.

In this chapter, we contextualize a suggested approach of strengthening equity and social justice research in mathematics education by inserting the mathematics education enterprise into two world events of 2020: the global COVID-19 pandemic and the global resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Our intent in doing so is to underscore how white colonialism is forever present everywhere in structures and institutions around the globe, including those of the mathematics education enterprise. The logics of both white supremacy and settler colonialism are described next and then combined into a compounding scheme of colonizing white supremacist logics. To illustrate that colonizing white supremacist logics are not a manifestation of only the West, a discussion of the conflicts and contradictions of white supremacy and Brahminical supremacy in the mathematics education enterprise of postcolonial India is offered. Brief summaries of the five chapters in the “Equity and Social Justice” section of this Handbook are then provided; we highlight how the chapter authors interrogated colonializing white supremacist logics within their respective chapters and point toward additional opportunities. In concluding the chapter, we feature recent USA-based mathematics education research to illustrate some different possibilities when equity and social justice research is indeed strengthened through critical interrogations of white supremacy and settler colonialism.

Mathematics education in India is offered in one of the 22 officially recognized state languages or in English even though there are at least 270 languages with more than 10,000 speakers each. Caste, a deep-rooted structure that stratifies Indian society, is integrally linked to shaping state languages. There is minimal research from India that looks at language and mathematics education and practically none that factors in caste. Focusing on Tamil Nadu, a state with a history of anti-caste movement on the one hand and pure Tamil movement (a movement that sought to create a Tamil language with no words from other languages) on the other, this conceptual paper seeks to explore this dimension. More specifically, by using caste as an analytical framework, and by drawing on examples from the mathematics textbooks published by the Tamil Nadu State Board of Education and the experience of a few teachers and learners, the paper seeks to make a theoretical argument that the use of pure Tamil in mathematics textbooks has negative implication for socio-culturally and economically marginalized students who are solely dependent on textbooks as the only source for learning mathematics. There is a strong need for carrying out empirical work that would highlight the nuances and complexities involved in realizing ‘mother tongue’ education in mathematics, particularly for those who belong to marginalized caste-class backgrounds, and we hope that such work would emerge in the future.

Textbooks function as an important resource for teaching and learning of mathematics at the school level across the world. At least at the primary grades the contents of textbooks are situated in the larger society around the learners, in order that the learners can relate to what is taught to them. This opens the possibility for textbooks to uncritically reinforce the prevailing stereotypes or use the opportunity textbook provide to creatively break the stereotypes. Mathematics education research has engaged with the question of gender stereotypes in mathematics textbooks which has had an impact how gender figures in textbooks. However, gender is neither a binary nor monolithic. In the Indian context, gender is not the only social hierarchy that operates. The National Curriculum Framework 2005(hence forth referred to as NCF 2005) addresses the question of prevailing stereotypes about children from social margins and says care must be taken to ensure that the curriculum, textbooks and classroom interaction do not reinforce the stereotypes. Moreover, in the last two decades transgender people have been able to demand recognition and acceptance at least in the higher educational spaces as transgender people. Given these, it would be important to understand how textbooks reflect the changes and demands. This paper analyses the content of the mathematics textbooks developed by the State Council of Education Research and Training (SCERT) of one Indian state, namely Kerala, to understand how they represent gender, caste, class and religious differences and to investigate if the textbooks are inclusive of the disabled learners. Based on the content analysis of the textbooks the paper argues that even as the textbooks try to ensure representation of both girls and boys in the pictures and word problems and make an attempt to be inclusive of different religions and marginalised cultures (for example by incorporating the picture of Theyyam, which uses an art form of the marginalised people in Kerala) in a textbook, they end up strengthening the existing gender, class, religious stereotypes. It also draws attention to the complete absence of disabled children in the textbooks.

In this essay, we contextualize a call for strengthening equity and social justice research in mathematics education by inserting the mathematics education enterprise into two world events of 2020: the global COVID-19 pandemic and the global resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. We do so to underscore how white colonialism is forever present everywhere in structures and institutions around the globe, including those of the mathematics education enterprise. We briefly describe the logics of white supremacy and settler colonialism and then combined them into a compounding scheme of colonizing white supremacist logics. Next, we feature recent USA-based mathematics education research to illustrate some different possibilities when equity and social justice research is indeed strengthened through critical interrogations of white supremacy and settler colonialism. We conclude the essay with a justification for getting in good trouble, necessary trouble.

This autobiographical account seeks to achieve two aims. One, it seeks to place in the public sphere a personal experience of abuse, trauma and loss of self-esteem that the author suffered as a doctoral student in mathematics. It details the experiences that allowed her to go beyond the disciplinary confines to engage with feminist and caste politics. Two, it describes and problematises, even if in a limited way, how mathematics and science research institutions are organised and function, the dominant notions and beliefs that operate in these spaces, and their implication for the larger academic atmosphere in the country. It throws light on the pervasive notions of merit that operate in the science institutions, contributing to the exclusion of women and those from marginalised castes.

In this paper, situated in the context of elementary and secondary school mathematics curriculum in India, I argue that centrally determined uniform curriculum would have very little to offer a large majority of students in a country that is diverse in many ways.

This article documents the experiences of women scientists in research institutions in India, and attempts to demonstrate that contrary to the claims made by the institutions in deciding who gets to do science, gender figures at various levels in shaping the career of a scientist. Using the narratives of women scientists, structured interviews and the data collected from research institutions, this article attempts to problematise the notion prevalent among scientists that talent for doing science is inherent in a person, and if it is there it will reveal itself irrespective of the external conditions. The article tries to argue that such a notion and the resultant practice leads to selecting a few as meritorious and deserving, who are further nurtured, while others are expected to prove themselves many times before opportunities are made available for them. Women rarely figure among the meritorious few. In order that women get equal opportunity to participate in the scientific endeavour, the structure and organisations of science institutions must be transparent, democratic in their approach, and rethink the narrow definition of 'merit' that is currently operative. © 2007 Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd.